Saturday, January 31, 2015

This Week in Madonna House - January 24-30

This week in
Madonna House, I was actually away from the place most of the week. I was off
giving a parish mission in this guy’s
parish up in the north-east corner of the Pembroke diocese. I am very much in my
talks-retreats-missions season of the year, and much of my time is taken up
with getting ready for the next one and the one after that, while keeping up
with my spiritual direction and other priestly duties. What is for most a
quieter time in MH is factually one of my busier times of the year.

Meanwhile in
MH, much is of a sameness from the prior instalments of this column. We
continue to have a small number of guests, giving our life a quieter and more
intimate feel. The work for the men has largely revolved around dealing with
winter—lots of snow removal, path shovelling, wood sheds to fill. We mostly
heat and cook with wood, and this is the season to be working in ‘the bush’,
cutting down the trees needed for firewood and lumber for future seasons. It
takes two years for the wood to cure properly for efficient burning, so this
season’s wood will be burnt in 2017.

For the
women, too, it is a time of year to simply keep things going. As I always say,
there are perpetually meals to cook, laundry to do, office work and so forth.
The handicraft center is a bit busier at this time of year than in the more
outdoors seasons, and they are busy making the candles for our liturgies from
all the donations of wax stubs and ends we get.

It is still
a season of sickness as well, and our nurses have been kept busy enough with
the various flus and other ailments. As our community ages, a certain amount of
work is involved with the very simple needs of driving people to and from
medical appointments and so forth.

We are getting
ready for our winter staff study sessions, where we take a couple of hours on
Friday afternoon to stop working and learn about some subject or other. This year,
we will be looking together at various aspects of consecrated life in the
Church, in response to Pope Francis declaring this year of consecrated life.

For fun, the
skating rink has been a great draw this year, and there aren’t too many
evenings or Sunday afternoons that do not see a crowd out there playing hockey
or practicing their figure skating moves. We’ve also been having weekly
documentary films in the evening on a wide variety of subjects in MH basement,
calling it the ‘Basement University.’ This week’s instalment was on fractals,
and someone wisecracked that it was the single nerdiest thing they have ever
experienced at MH. I am not a mathematical type whatsoever, and was still away
at the mission at that point. Attempts to explain to me what fractals are and
why they are important met, I am sorry to say, with complete failure.

Also in the
category of ‘fun’, for our post-lunch communal spiritual reading we are reading
Fr. Eddie Doherty’s Cricket in My Heart, his
autobiography covering more or less his meeting, wooing, and wedding Catherine
Doherty, their coming to Combermere to start MH, and ending with his ordination
to the priesthood in the Melkite rite. Eddie is a masterful and very funny
writer, and this has been a nice light reading in what has been a somewhat
heavy time (illness, death of Fr. Duffy, etc.).

It has also
been a great chance for our younger members to get to know Eddie and connect
with that history of the apostolate in a different way. Sadly, the book is out
of print right now, so I can’t recommend it to you for purchase. (Edited to add: some of my faithful readers have pointed out that used copies are available, both at Amazon and at this link. Thanks, faithful readers!)

So I guess
that’s about it for the weekly recap—at least the best I can do, given that I
wasn’t even here this week! As always, know that as we go about our simple
ordinary Nazareth life, we keep you all and the whole world in our prayers and
hearts.